Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Terminator: Resistance - Part 3 (Final)

While this game may take place in 2029, the posts for it will end here, in the present, tonight.

Next up is one of the better parts of the game. There's an old mansion in the Hollywood Hills that is crawling with terminators. Eight of them to be exact, and you have to take them all out. They've got purple lasers (that's right, purple lasers have arrived) and can take you out in about one second. I had to break out some strategy and use traps/stealth for the first time in a while.

Here I managed to get one with the Termination Knife. Grabbed its plasma rifle, even though my level is far short of the level 24 needed to use it.

Here's some of the mansion gameplay. This one little area is definitely one of the more compelling parts of the game, and it's a lot of fun to play around in. Taking out all eight T-800s is a real challenge, especially since you don't have purple lasers and they do.

An HK soars overhead.

The hacking puzzles are getting pretty crowded now. This is as good a time as any to just skip all of them by dropping chips you don't need.

I've got a ton of those, too. You really only need your 6 best chips for equipment because there isn't too much reason to carry more than 2 plasma weapons at a time unless you're trying out different things.

The Skynet outposts are getting creepier. This one has a mass of cords and cables everywhere with glass pods against the walls. What was in those glass pods? I don't know.

Here's the most brilliant scientist in the area. He's managed to live in the basement of the mansion for a while, somehow. He subdued a few T-800s and figured out how to reprogram one, which might come in handy if the Resistance gets access to the guy. Also, he knows how to reverse-engineer purple plasma beams.

This reminds me of the terminator action figures I had as a kid, and how their forearms would consistently fall off.

He explains why these new plasma weapons are so much more powerful than the first generation.

The masked stranger shows up again. He's from the future, but who is he? (WHO? Who?)

Shops are brimming with all kinds of weapons now.

We've reached the point in the game where some of the boss-like enemies from earlier are now showing up as regular foes.

A little bit of pale moonlight.

The final outpost of the game is chock full of machines. This one is a real challenge to infiltrate and take down.

Here's some outpost gameplay, featuring the debut of my own purple lasers. Even though I can dust T-800s now...they can still dust me even faster, so I had to tread lightly and try to get the drop on them.

A moment I've been waiting for all game, as I finally get to battle an HK tank. The weak point is on its back, though it also tracks you around and rarely gives you chances to hit it. You're supposed to use a rocket launcher, but I found it easier to just strafe around and pelt it with lasers wherever I could.

Here's the rocket launcher. The front of the tank is surprisingly flat. Like the aerial HKs, these guys seem like a lot of resources for a diminishing return. Unless they can double as T-800 transports or something. I guess they're pretty unstoppable under normal circumstances (i.e. not against organized resistance) but it's sorta like killing an ant with a rifle. I guess putting a few of these together on the battlefield was a pretty good way to roll over an area.

...someone should make a Terminator RTS where you can play as the resistance side or the Skynet side. Now that we've gotten a game where you can shoot purple lasers, a Terminator RTS is going to be the next thing I spend years wishing for.

It can't see me behind this wall. Much like its aerial cousin, it isn't too bright.

Here's the most versatile and powerful weapon in the game, an advanced plasma rifle. That's right, even among the purple lasers there's a higher class of weapon, and you're looking at it. It looks very familiar, trying to figure out if this was in one of the movies. This thing is so powerful that it sorta obsoletes the other available plasma weapons. There are a bunch of new ones I want to try, though, so I only whip this out when times are tough.

It figures that the TDE is where Griffith Observatory used to be, since Griffith Observatory is where the first terminator popped into 1984.

At this point you can romance Jennifer or Baron (not both of them, ya bastards) before the final battle begins. However, doing so means you don't get the best ending. Here we see Jennifer post-coitus. They play the bed-scene music from the original movie here, and the scenes sorta go on. Don't watch it with your parents, like that one SNL sketch.

YEP, THE SCENE'S STILL GOIN' ON

Back to the action, as we gun down HKs with rocket launchers!

Our heroes get fed faulty intel about where the Skynet core is and end up in some creepy basement.

During the full-scale assault on the fake base, terminators infiltrate your home bunker nearby, completely decimating everyone in it. Not sure if this is supposed to be the same bunker as the flashback in the first movie, but it does look just like it. This is kinda rough because it's been your base of operations for the last few hours of the game, and now it's in ruins.

In other news, my new advanced plasma rifle is a beast.

Baron takes a hit here, and that's all she wrote. Also, Jennifer got killed because she didn't leave the base, sticking around to hang out with you the player. In other words... don't bang anyone in this game, because they'll DIE.

With the bunker destroyed and half of the cast dead (pretty much every minor character that I didn't convince to leave) it's time for revenge. This destroyed HK tank is badass. The Resistance and the Annihilation Line are going mano-a-mano now.

Some more purple laser gameplay, as we charge through the fields.

Arriving at the main Resistance base, I find all kinds of crazy weapons. Unfortunately I don't think the giant miniguns are usable.

Here's John Connor. He looks super familiar, but I can't place what actor it is that I'm thinking of. He's overseeing the reprogramming of a massive HK tank that we're going to use to storm the Skynet gates.

There are two other skill trees besides this one, with various talents to learn. At max level (28) I was able to get everything except Stealth 3 and Crafting 5. That's right, you end up two points short of getting everything. Presumably there are skill books to find that can get you the rest of the way. I just think it's weird that max level is 28 and that I ended up two points short. Why not just make max level 30?

John re-creates the walk from the beginning of T2. The battlefield looks completely different though...in that it isn't even a battlefield. You hear all kinds of battle sounds, but don't see anything. It's a real miss, especially after the hype of seeing him walk down the corridor. It's almost like they ran out of dev time at this point and couldn't animate the battle that he's looking at.

Here's our reprogrammed tank. This thing brakes for nobody. For some weird reason it only has red lasers, though. Everybody else has purple lasers now, red lasers are so last week.

Having this thing chasing you around helping you defeat foes just makes me think the final stage would have been better if you fought it instead, with it chasing you through the area. Sorta the reverse of the infiltrator boss fight earlier. The game never again has a boss fight on that level.

The very end of the stage puts you right outside the Skynet Pyramid (which in this game is in L.A. for some reason instead of Cheyenne Mountain). The last line of defense is an HK tank, the second one in the game that you can fight. It's a big beefy final boss...not much of one though, because after about 30 seconds of engaging it, the fight automatically ends and goes to cutscene. I didn't have time to bring it down, which was a little disappointing. It's definitely possible to, at least, if you go right for it.

And...that's it. Was kinda hoping we'd go into the Skynet Pyramid itself and smash the core. Could have had a REALLY cool final area inside the core, even if it was just a few hallways. Dawn of Fate had that. A really insane final boss would have been a T-1000 prototype (besides the one it already sent back) that you fight right before reaching the core. It could melt down and move around and do T-1000 things while you and your squad whittle it down with a sustained barrage of plasma beams.

At the end of the day, there's all kinds of cool stuff they could have done with this game. For what it is, it's awesome and a lot of fun. Can't help but think that with a bigger budget, the game would have been far better off though. It could have been a bit longer and had more variety of machines, with a not so rushed final stage. It could have been more, basically. I'm happy with what it is but I wish I could give the devs six more months of development time and a bunch of cash to really fill the game out.

So, it turns out Skynet sent three terminators back before we got there. At first I thought "they're counting T3?" but no.

There's the first Arnold, the T-1000 prototype, and... another tough infiltrator meant to kill you the player, Rivers. Since you directly help bring down Skynet, it sends an infiltrator back to earlier in this very game to stop you. That's the one that stalks you for the first half of the game and that you end up having a big battle with. The masked man is also from here, and went back to make sure everything happened the way it was supposed to. This is also why the TDE got moved from that one basement we were supposed to find it in: The infiltrator warned Past Skynet to move it in advance.

I kinda wish Salvation had done something like this with the one T-800 at the end of the movie, had it be from Elsewhere. 2018 was way too early to have a T-800 in the timeline, even as a prototype.

You heard it here, folks: There's only one T-1000. I've read in a few places that it's possible there were two, but as far as I know all official T2 materials kinda indicated there was only one.

But wait a minute. How'd Skynet send back the terminators for the first two movies at the same time? Cause the time the T-1000 goes to is a direct result of what the first terminator did, and that time wouldn't have even been necessary to go to if the first terminator had succeeded. Unless we're going by "Back to the Future Rules" and Skynet waited a minute after the first one, went "nope, everything is still blowing up around me" and then sent the T-1000 through. I mean even if one of them succeeded I'm pretty sure everything would have continued blowing up. Just means in another timeline things would be different. I don't know time stuff.

And that's it. Good game, pretty much have all my thoughts here. Waited several decades for it. Did it deliver? Not fully, but it didn't have to. Really good for what it is.

It's also a particularly easy platinum trophy to get, as most of the trophies just come from a normal playthrough. I could see this game getting a second life as a popular one for trophy hunters.

Some nice scenes at the end, as you see people coming out of the woodwork to build a new world. It's got to be pretty weird having machines standing around shut down. Check out the birds landing on one of them. I mean it's like free war monuments everywhere.

Kyle crashes into the pavement in 1984, and the first two movies begin. This game works well as a prequel for them.

Here's the final stage, in all of its glory. They didn't quite nail the visual of Connor walking out and looking around (where are the HKs and the...like...battle?) but I appreciate the attempt. All in all this is a pretty rad game for Terminator fans. The bit at the end where all of the terminators shut down is straight out of the original T2 screenplay and its description of what happened when Skynet fell.

In other news, here's a trip back in time to look at Dawn of Fate's final area. I mentioned that I wanted to see some of the Skynet interior in this game and felt like it abruptly ended before you got to see any of it. Here's a look at said interior in game form, in the only game I know of that does it. Dawn of Fate is cool because of what it covers in the Terminator lore, but it isn't a very good game. A shooter like this was a better call. Now bring on an RTS.